The Lightwave Blog

Posted by Stephen Hardy

Aurora Networks today announced the NC2000, a new optical platform it developed for the European cable-TV market. In a pre-briefing I received on the announcement, I asked what was so European about it. The answers to that question provided an insight into the European cableco market.

Not surprisingly, the NC2000 is based on Aurora Networks' existing NC4000 platform. However, it needed to be repackaged for the European market. The company's vice president of marketing, John Dahlquist, says that most European cablecos have buried plant and the NC4000 was designed primarly for pole mounting. So the platform had to be packaged to so that most of the outputs were on one end of a shorter, more compact package that could be vertically mounted. Naturally, the trend in new housing developments in the U.S. is toward underground cabling, so Dahlquist says Aurora plans to offer a similar configuration to U.S. cablecos in the future. The other major difference is that European cablecos operate in different wavelength bands than their U.S. counterparts.

Meanwhile, Aurora Networks will offer its RFoG, RF PON, and related FTTH and "Fiber Deep" capabilities. Dahlquist says that European cablecos have expressed interest in RFoG and wouldn't necessarily insist on starting the standards process for such a capability from scratch. The fact that the current SCTE efforts are going to be PON friendly should make for a smooth transition to the European marketplace, he believes.

Dahlquist says the platform was developed by specific customer requirements and that deployment announcements should come in the near future. It will be interesting to see how close to the customer those carriers run fiber.

Labels: Aurora Networks, cablecos, RFoG